Collaboration and productivity are closely linked. Teams need to be able to work seamlessly together and share knowledge to drive businesses towards their goals. However, empowering employees to collaborate effectively isn’t always as simple as it seems. For instance, one study found that employees consider up to 72% of their meetings to be unproductive.

Simply allowing staff members to share ideas and insights with the right meeting software and spaces isn’t enough. Companies need to ensure they’re investing in the right spaces, technology, and resources, to enable strategic, impactful teamwork.

To achieve this, organizations need the right data. Leveraging insights gathered from collaboration platforms, devices, meeting rooms, and more, ensures companies can nurture productivity by adapting their investments and environments to the needs of their teams.

Here’s how you can use data to maximize productivity and collaboration in 2024.

Step 1: Use Data to Redesign the Hybrid Office

The workplace has evolved. Though companies are actively encouraging employees back into office environments, only a third of CEOs from leading companies believe they’ll implement a full “office-based” workplace strategy in the next three years. Hybrid and flexible work is becoming the new norm, which means that larger meeting and conference spaces are becoming less crucial.

While there may still be some office environments which rely on larger meeting spaces, many will find themselves shifting to new workplace design strategies in the months ahead. Focus spaces and smaller huddle rooms are becoming increasingly common in the hybrid workplace.

Transforming a large conference room space into a series of smaller desk spaces could offer companies an exceptional way to not only reduce costs, but improve productivity and collaboration. After all, employees can only work effectively together when they have access to the right resources.

With data-driven insights into the spaces that employees use, and the technologies they use when in those environments (from laptops to webcams), businesses can identify how to redesign the office with a focus on productivity. They can determine whether a series of focus spaces, enabled with tools for video conferencing will improve productivity more than larger meeting rooms.

They can also determine which innovations may improve the collaboration experience for staff members, such as investing in new XR technologies, conferencing equipment, or BYOD solutions.

Additionally, Alfredo Ramirez, CEO of Vyopta, says, “The workforce must continually evaluate, test, learn, and optimize new applications and best practices to build trust, set expectations, and leverage collaboration intelligence to scale results.”

Step 2: Leverage Data to Mitigate Collaboration Roadblocks

Technology is the key to empowering and supporting collaboration in today’s era of hybrid work. Unfortunately, all solutions, from endpoints and devices, to meeting room software and collaboration tools can encounter technical issues. These issues, when not identified quickly, can lead to significant disruptions in workflows, lost productivity, and problems with collaboration.

According to a study by Vyopta, in 20% of all meetings, at least one person is likely to encounter a quality experience issue that harms their ability to communicate and collaborate. To address this problem, companies need the right data.

First, they need an ecosystem that allows them to collect insights from all of the devices, spaces, and software solutions employees use to collaborate overtime. A comprehensive view of the collaborative technology stack can make it easier to detect roadblocks and issues that harm productivity.

Insights gathered over time can help business leaders to determine ways to address and prevent problems from occurring in the future. For instance, simply adjusting network bandwidth to prioritize video meetings, or investing in a new solution for video conferencing could address a range of problems. Secondly, companies also need a way to proactively monitor issues.

Proactive monitoring, with the ability to set up real-time alerts for device problems, call quality concerns and more ensures business leaders can rapidly respond to factors that harm collaboration and productivity, when they occur. This can reduce disruptions in meetings instantly, eliminating wasted time in the office.

Plus, it can help to improve employee experiences, leading to higher levels of engagement, and reduced talent turnover.

Step 3: Use Data to Understand and Optimize Meeting Culture

Finally, to create an environment that nurtures collaboration and productivity, companies need to take a consistent approach. It’s not enough to simply implement office changes once. The workplace is constantly evolving, as are the needs and preferences of employees. Ensuring teams have the best collaborative experiences means reviewing data consistently over time.

Using the data collected from devices, meeting rooms, and software, business leaders can gain valuable insights into meeting culture, and how it evolves over time. For instance, one study by Vyopta found that meetings attended between three to five individuals tended to involve a high number of participants spending the conversation on mute.

This discovery could indicate that employees in a meeting space don’t feel empowered to contribute, or that they didn’t necessarily need to attend that meeting in the first place. In other instance, this discovery could help a business implement new technologies and processes that improve engagement among employees, or reduce the number of unnecessary meetings they need to attend.

Clear insights into employee experiences and meeting culture can ensure business leaders implement strategies that not only optimize workspaces, but also improve employee experiences, reduce costs, and help to strengthen team relationships.

Ramirez adds:

“Collaboration is at the heart of business success, with employees dedicating nearly half of their work hours to engaging with others; to harness this power, organizations must create environments that nurture and support effective teamwork.”

Using Data to Maximize Productivity

The workplace is constantly evolving, creating new challenges for companies to overcome, as well as new opportunities. For any organization to ensure they’re cultivating an environment that supports effective collaboration and promotes productivity, the right data is crucial.

Fortunately, companies like Vyopta offer organizations a way to leverage more of their data for intelligent decision making. Vyopta’s digital experience analytics solution allows companies to unify data from a range of devices, systems, and software, for a holistic view into the factors that affect collaboration and productivity.

The company’s easy-to-use and flexible platform has already helped companies reduce the time taken to resolve issues in collaboration experiences by 75%, and improve employee experiences with 50% greater meeting quality. What’s more, Vyopta has helped customers save more than $10 million by allowing them to optimize their spaces and technology with data-driven insights.

Vyopta’s ecosystem proves that the right technology, and the correct data, is the key to unlocking consistent productivity and better collaboration in the future of work.



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